Founding Product Engineer

About The Job Founding Product Engineer

Our Client

A fast growing standards and insurance startup based in San Francisco, they have raised 15 million dollars in funding and are reinventing how enterprises adopt AI agents. Their two pronged model, which includes creating the industry’s first AI agent standard and pairing it with bespoke insurance coverage, gives AI companies a trusted pathway to certify their agents and reduces enterprise risk. By helping AI vendors earn credible certification and providing insurance protection against failures such as hallucinations, data leaks, or control breakdowns, they enable enterprise buyers to deploy AI with confidence rather than fear. With deep expertise in AI risk, insurance, and standards, they are building the essential “confidence infrastructure” that will support safe AI scale up.

About Us

Catalyst Labs is a leading talent agency with a specialized vertical in Applied AI, Machine Learning, and Data Science. We stand out as an agency that’s deeply embedded in our clients’ recruitment operations.

We collaborate directly with Founders, CTOs, and Heads of AI in those themes who are driving the next wave of applied intelligence from model optimization to productized AI workflows. We take pride in facilitating conversations that align with your technical expertise, creative problem-solving mindset, and long-term growth trajectory in the evolving world of intelligent systems.

Location: San Francisco

Work type: Full Time,

Compensation: above market base + bonus + equity

Roles & Responsibilities

• Lead end-to-end development of AI agent products and infrastructure, collaborating closely with the founding team.
• Build and scale evaluation pipelines to detect AI agent failures in deployment (e.g., hallucinations, jailbreaks, brand risks, data leakage).
• Design and implement the gold standard for secure, safe, and reliable AI agents.
• Develop and maintain full-stack systems, including backend (Python, LangChain) and frontend (React, TypeScript) components.
• Create monitoring tools, filters, and authorization frameworks to support AI agent builders.
• Work on-site in San Francisco, contributing to a fast-paced, high-agency startup environment.
• Ship products frequently, gather user feedback, and iterate rapidly to improve reliability and safety of AI systems.

Qualifications

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

1+ years of experience as an AI Software Engineer with active coding responsibilities.

Proven expertise developing AI agents and LLM-based systems (e.g., published research or work in a leading AI team).

Founding or early-stage startup experience, with demonstrated ability to own end-to-end product development.

Strong understanding of AI evaluation methodologies and deployment reliability standards.

Excellent problem-solving and communication skills with the ability to articulate technical impact in business terms.

Evidence of high agency, ownership, and execution velocity (e.g., promotions in Can work full-time on-site in San Francisco (5 days a week).